Given the sharing that happened yesterday — scroll down in my post here — I decided to see if TinEye would uncover that use and perhaps others.

Well, no:

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Well, perhaps it didn’t like the URL I gave it. But that’s just no excuse. Because I’ve used that image in at least three posts. And it found none of them!

Then I decided to try a famous image. Because I Am Mean!

I used that famous space shuttle photo that’s been floating around and is the subject of the article I linked to at the beginning of this post. I mean, come on, it should be able to find something as widely used as that, right?

Um, no:

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So, if I had to answer the question, Does TinEye work at all? My own reply would be: No.

It’s dead but no one’s pulling the plug officially…and why would they. They’ll let it continue to be a small revenue stream until the user base dries up. Not a bad strategy, considering there’s no back end dev on the project anymore.

Once Google got in the game I suspect TinEye decided that investing software dev on this project is crazy from a fiscal perspective. But they’re not going to announce that it’s dead…that would be throwing tons of ad $$$ away.

Have attempted to use Tineye to find images over several years, but mostly with no success, even have it as an add on with firefox. It can manage to find an image, but this is few and very far between.

I have no idea what the point of it is? As the whole thing is a waste of time.

Tineye used to work great back in the day…maybe around 2007-2008 if I remember correctly. I haven’t been able to get it to return anything for several years, though. Google has a nice reverse image search tool now, but it’s just not the same.

Even though it’s free, I still call it a scam. Anything that is so popular on the net, and doesn’t work is wasting our time. I wonder how many people have tried it several times to find it doesn’t work.

I’ve got close to 400 webpages on the net, been there for about 15 years, many images are stolen / hijacked. Tineye has not found one single occurrence.

I used it about two years ago, it worked fine, Facebook, other sites, if there was a fake profile out there I knew where the pics where from. Just now been trying it and getting nothing. It did pick up on an old comment I made like 5 years ago I forgot I ever was even on, but then I tried a friend on facebook and it didn’t even come back to face book. Seems most photos are stolen from facebook these days now that Myspace is crap, most fake profile pics should come back to that, but if it won’t even come back to the persons page I got it off from, what use is that? Just garbage. Not cool like it used to be.

It’s strange. I only discovered tineye about 6 months ago, and I used it a whole bunch of times successfully for a few months. I loved it. But for the past few months, nothing. The last 20 or 30 times, at least, it has yielded no results whatsoever, while google image search finds them. I don’t know why it stopped working, but I’m disappointed because I liked the way tineye would allow you to arrange the image results in order of the largest file first, or the oldest post first, etc.